Dan Sturges is a transport visionary. For twenty years he’s foreseen and been tackling some of the transport-related problems the rest of the world is only just starting to grapple with. Sturges isn’t anti-car. He is simply pro shaking up mobility full stop, and believes that far from just moving people in to electric cars, we need to introduce people to a variety of vehicles - ones that are the right size for each journey they make.

A couple of months back, I chatted to him over skype about his current thoughts on his company Intrago, the future of mobility, and what the auto industry is up to. You can see an edited highlight of that video below, and then after the jump I’ve pulled out and discussed what I think are the key points he made.

They may seem virtual, but they're very real, and they come with loyal, influential followers. And they don't wait to be hired - they crave to be hired and have more useful insights along the way than most who already are.

Drew Smith is one of a new generation of commentators, driving conversations online about the future. Subject experts, independent of mind and building their careers around a portfolio - of experience, opinion, connections and commissions. He edits the Downsideupdesign blog.

Amy talks to him below. Listen carefully, because he's exactly the kind of person who is starting to influence how brands are perceived, design conversations happen, and connections are forged. In the past, people either got jobs in an industry or didn't. Once they were in, they got locked behind walls for years, until they got onto a press spokesperson list. Now they can dive into and across industry projects, often hired because they've already articulated problems publicly. They can build their own unique identity, online content and networks of supporters, share their ideas and work together more easily with others than many who work in siloed departments. Many are cross-discipline, combining understanding of product, service and interactive design.

Drew is unique, but of course he's not - he's one of an emerging group. You might be carving out a similar purpose - in urban planning, product design, social software, interactive design, service design, environment technologies or services. The sky's the limit. If so, we'd love to get to know you.

If you want to know what the future car’s going to look like, it’s worth having a chat with one of the Callum brothers. On Friday, Ian Callum unveiled Jaguar’s new XJ - which set tongues wagging around the world. But while big brother is grappling with the future of luxury cars, little brother has an even more interesting job – working out the future of mainstream, global car design. So a few weeks ago we spoke with Moray – man behind many recent Mazdas and the new Ford Taurus, and recently made executive director of Ford’s design Americas. Check the video, and then see our take on what he said below:

“What makes a car good is going to change”

Here in Europe, since the Focus I of 1998, Ford’s cars have stood out because they’re fantastic to drive. Ride and handling balance, steering feel, and control weights are all top of the class. It’s true that in the motoring press at least, a car will rarely be deemed “good” unless it drives dynamically well. But Moray believes that “the technologies that make a car good will change” - and he implies that the focus will move into vehicle interior functionality and connectivity. Today’s cars suffer from a problematic mis-match between their development lead times and the pace of technological change. Acknowledging something needs to be done about this, and tallying with what J Mays recently told us, Moray makes clear that Ford is lining up to position itself as top of the tree in this area too.

2009 Focus RS. Steers and handles like no 300bhp FWD car has any right to...

Yet while Ford rhetoric currently focuses on “Sync” and the Fiesta’s centre console (which apes the design of a mobile phone keypad), there’s clearly the potential for a car’s interior to change even more radically with implementation of touchscreens, and soft – rather than hard – ware. A radical vision might be that the vehicle interior becomes a blank, digital canvas. Removal of heavyweight hardware could reduce weight, improving overall vehicle efficiency. If interiors became endlessly reconfigurable, added to or subtracted from with software applications, then individualization and configurability increases massively - allowing users to tailor cars to their precise needs. It may sound strange, but such developments have the potential to make a vehicle more sustainable – by allowing them to be reconfigured for different drivers and usages.

As Moray suggests, what sofware based apps means is that "it doesn't mean to say you need to get a new car to get the new technology". Potentially, this means consumers get bored less quickly, and cars survive for longer. Whether a new 'model-upgrade' culture would be allowed to replace the model-change culture of today's industry, itself a product of the need to maintain mass production, is of course open to debate. But the idea of car companies making money from software services and upgrades, rather than just mechanical maintenance and vehicle sales, is fascinating.

“[Car sharing] gives us the chance to make cars more specific for specific tasks”

We know car sharing’s on the radar at Ford. Sue Cischke surprised us earlier this year when she talked about how the company had been looking at it. But if you ask car designers about such ideas, you’re often met with a blank response - the organisational structure meaning it isn’t what design departments do or think about. At first, Callum does the same, suggesting “it’s outside of the realms of the design side of things”. But as we talk more he seems interested in what the increasing popularity of models such as Zipcar might mean for future vehicle design. What excites him is the potential to design more targeted, specific (and by implication, efficient) cars – targeted at specific usages or users: “if you’re going to use one sort of car to do one sort of motoring, and another to do a different sort, you can really pinpoint the design to something that’s much more applicable to the task, but at the same time much more exciting.”

A current Mustang Zipcar - but could car sharing allow Ford's designers to develop much more targeted, specific, efficient designs in the future?What Ford’s designers should do next

As one of the big-name designers now brought together under the ‘One Ford’ umbrella (others that stand out are J Mays, Freeman Thomas and Martin Smith), Callum has both an enviable and unenviable task ahead of him. He’s with some of the best designers in the business, and Ford appears to be on the right track – yet the car industry is rapidly changing (just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, and hadn’t noticed). The past fifteen years have seen an unrelenting march toward ‘prestige’ and a push up market by many car makers. Everyone has chased, but few have made inroads into, the dominance of the Germans - particularly BMW and Audi. The German’s are now ‘micro-nicheing’ - creating new vehicle segments, to questionable effect. Their brand cachet means they’ve got away with it to date, but this questionable nicheing (BMW 5 series GT anyone?) is an entire world away from the sorts of really useful, targetted 'niche' cars Moray mentions which could be developed for specific usage purposes as part of larger car share schemes. Such a policy would make much more sense for a brand such as Ford to be looking at, than some of the niches the Germans are pushing. Today, having sold off its premium lines, Ford is happily 'non-premium' and is instead focusing on a series of core models, creating ‘world vehicles’ or platforms.

Such consolidation looks smart right now. It saves money, and millions of brands probably aren’t that best thing to have today (ask GM). Yet creating cars that are all things to all people – across four continents, is a tough brief. On top of this, the Blue Oval’s core areas - mainstream hatchbacks in Europe, and trucks and Mustangs in the US - are likely to come under increased competitive pressure over the coming years, of the like never seen before. So is the ‘core-line’ approach enough to keep Ford’s head above water in the mid and longer term?

Maybe. Ford has a clear strategy for now, but it needs to go further and really utilize the talents of people like Callum, especially if it’s committed to being a sustainable leader. So while BMW ruminates on Project-I, which has somehow become a “premium” urban mobility solution for cities in 2014, and Toyota tinkers with the ‘I’ Series (iSwing, iReal) of personal mobility concepts chairs, there’s an opportunity for Ford to become the true world leader in the sub-car personal mobility sector. The market doesn’t exist right now, but it will – and this is what Ford needs to see. Not only does the brand carry exactly the right down-to-earth, ‘of the people’ image to suit such an area, but it would instantly give the company a jump on Toyota, positioning it close to the political decision makers and city leaders, and as the car company really thinking about a future generation’s mobility needs in the growing metropolises of the world.

Toyota's 'i' Series. Today people scoff at these vehicles, but Ford is missing a trick by not letting its designers loose on this space

We know that Ford is already looking at urban mobility issues, involved in research at places like MIT and Stanford, and we also know that while existing mobility projects from these teams are systematically and technically appealing and advanced, they hold little aesthetic appeal. So Ford is well placed to let its latent design talent off the leash, to allow them to define and develop a ‘Ford’ look for transportation in our 21st century cities. A Model T for the city of 2020? I’d love to see what Moray Callum thinks that would look like.

Bill Ford is a man on a mission. He’s currently championing the idea of raising gas taxes, something that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable for a car company boss to say. But we live in changed times. Chrysler is in bankruptcy protection, with GM perhaps shortly to follow, but Ford's balance sheet isn’t entirely rosy either with a net loss of $1.4Bn in the last quarter, and sales off 30 percent. Scarier still, Porsche (most profitable car company in the world by reputation, trying to swallow – now merge with, VW) reportedly came close to bankruptcy for three days in March (schadenfreude anyone?).

So why does Bill Ford think these are exciting times to be in the auto industry? Because what he has talked about for years – big and scary stuff, namely change – is now happening. Bill (Ford) is the guy who set Ford (Motor Company) on the path towards a more sustainable future. Doing things like hiring 'eco architect' William McDonough to rebuild the Rouge site was the start. He oversaw the hiring of Alan Mulally as CEO – a man from outside the auto industry, who had overseen the most radical restructuring of an industry’s development process (Boeing) that had been seen for 50 years. And now, the assembled team at Ford are bringing you the all-conquering Fiesta, a Fusion hybrid which out hybrids the Japanese, a real Taurus and the next euro-Focus, which you just know is going to be top of its class. Ford has a line of products people want. What it’s done, doing and thinking about is strong enough to get hard-bitten journalists like Jean Jennings – editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine – talking about the firm like this:

But more than that – signs are even there that Ford’s daring to stick its head up above the gun turret and have a think about scary future concepts like car sharing, high-speed rail and mega cities. To which we say: get on with it guys!

The mood of optimism in Dearborn is palpable, but Ford must be careful not to appear smug. It is likely to benefit from the current difficulties its neighbours from across town are experiencing. Spend some time online and you might have noticed the brand throwing its weight around too. Ford recently ranked first among automotive brands in terms of Internet buzz. That’s thanks to campaigns like Fiesta Movement; and people like Scott Monty – who you’ll find here, there and everywhere in the world of automotive social media; not to mention them letting some weird guys from the UK in to interview top Sustainability and Design brass.

Ford's innovative 'Smartgauge' display screen debuted in the Fusion Hybrid - which Jean Jennings talks about in the video above

The path ahead is fraught with pitfalls. Having supported auto bailouts until now, John Fleming – Ford of Europe’s chairman – became a dissenting voice last week, suggesting that nationalistic bailouts to Europe’s other car makers (think French) were putting the company’s European arm at a competitive disadvantage. What’s more, few are convinced Americans want small cars, and building hybrid and electric vehicles is hellishly expensive. Compounding this is that if gas stays sub $2/gallon, no one’s buying small, and no one’s buying eco – which could prove problematic. No wonder Bill wants increased gas taxes. And while Ford and Toyota pursue ‘top-up’ plug in hybrids and pure electric vehicles, the Chevy Volt might still prove to be the ideal third way. Ford has a five-powertrain future strategy, covering petrol, diesel, hybrid, plug-in and pure EV - which tries to cover all possible bases - but it’s going to be hugely expensive to develop all of them well, especially considering uber-stringent diesel emission regulations, and the fact that you need different cell chemistries for hybrids, plug-ins and pure ev batteries.

One ace up Ford’s sleeve? Electric delivery. We launched our project on this last week, because we think it’s one of the biggest ‘win’ areas in transportation today. While everyone gets hung up on moving people around, it’s goodslogistics and delivery which presents arguably a bigger problem – and a greater opportunity - right now. Clearly someone at Ford has realised this, and the electric version of the Transit Connect delivery truck will be arriving shortly, and we’ll be following it every step of the way to launch and beyond.

Risky Ford’s path may be, but the auto industry’s going to hell in a hand-cart right now, so someone has to stick their neck out. Bill Ford appears to have got a taste for doing that, which is why he’s enjoying the ride. He clearly recognises the need for industry and regulators to work together, and understands the benefit in Ford sharing some of what it’s learnt so far (green roofed factories) and sharing risk in tomorrow's future strategies (city and electric power company partnerships). So 101 years after his great grandfather pretty much invented the auto industry, could Bill Ford re-emerge as ambassador and mouth piece for not only Ford - but the wider industry's future? Stranger things have happened.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 26th May 2009

Images: Bill Ford: Ford media Others: Movement Design Bureau

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design research work in 2009

Eric Britton has a plan. The man behind worldstreets.org, thinks a lot about the future of transport, and its connection to the overheating nature of the planet. His 'Plan B' vision is a radical twelve point blueprint that he thinks needs to be gone through to stop us cooking the planet - and is an interesting read.

In the green transport field right now, alongside electric cars, high-speed rail, and all the usual stuff that gets tossed around, perhaps the most intriguing idea concerns not the development of new products, but the networking together, and sharing of existing ones. Our cars, bicylces, space - how do we 'use' them more effectively? Take cars. Right now, we're fast-forwarding to a world of hybrids and EVs - but what's the point when we've still got single vehicle occupancy, one-person-to-one-car ownership, and one hour in every 24 utilisation rates?

The problem is that at the very heart of the notion of today's car is a concept built around ownership, freedom and the ability to cut yourself off in a little glass and steel box. Your car is a space that, right now, you probably only choose to 'share' with your friends and family. Sharing a car with a complete stranger (even if you're not both in it at the same time) is a relatively big leap to make, but it's something worth thinking about.

That's what Eric wants to look into in more depth. So in the video chat (above) we had with him a few weeks back, he described the idea of a conference - for want of a better word - to draw people together to talk about sharing within the bounds of future transportation. On the first day, Eric suggests transportation-related talk should be banned. Instead, the attendees - linked together with experts and interested parties across the world via video and internet, would seek to understand the human psychology behind sharing things. Then on the next days, this would be developed into the field of transportation applications. The big news? Eric doesn't think it will work without a woman at the helm...